Have you leveraged on intelligent automation for your Marketing and Sales processes?

According to a survey done by Semrush, 71% of marketers find IA could be useful for personalization. When it comes to Marketing and Sales, it is important that businesses craft strategies to have better engagements with their customers and prospects. With the large amount of data that needs to be processed, employees may benefit with the help of IA through tasks automation.

Read more: 5 Signs Why Your Business Need a Digital Worker

How can Intelligent Automation helps processes in Marketing and Sales, and bring more productivity and efficiency?

1. Collect data faster and easier with web scraping

In Sales and Marketing, data holds a very important role. It can be data of your competitors, which needs update frequently for you to stay competitive. It can also be data of what is trending in the market now, which also needs frequent management and update for you to stay in the business. As the customers has dynamic needs, it is important to always refresh your data. Data helps you to build effective campaigns and marketing/sales strategy, thus you can better aim your customers by launching the product or service that fills their need. You can also leverage on data to evaluate your product or service.

But, how do you manage data? How do you collect data, that sometimes may vary and reside in different sources such as documents, systems, social medias, platforms?

Intelligent automation can help you to collect data faster and easier, with web scraping.

What is web scraping?

Web scraping is the automation of structured web data extraction. You can automatically collect publicly available at a large scale that resides in website, social medias, or e-commerce platforms. By this, the cognitive bots can collect data and store it on your end for you to use or analyze it accordingly. This method will help marketing and sales department to have automated data collection. Instead of spending so much time on collecting and gathering data, marketing and sales department can save time to build better strategies leveraging on that data to aim at their customers better.

Read more about how to automate data collection faster with web scraping

Take a peek on how cognitive bots do web scraping:

2. Better understanding of customer satisfaction with sentiment analysis

It is important to measure and keep tracks of customer satisfaction (and their feedbacks) towards your product or services. Having a thorough knowledge of how customer feels about your product or service can help you to evaluate and do improvement. Here again, data plays a very crucial role – collecting and analyzing data is very important to do. This sentiment analysis is also helpful for you if your marketing department wants to do research on the trend in the market, or if they want to launch a product – but before they want to know how the public sentiment is towards similar product.

With the AI features in Intelligent automation, it is possible to do text analytics. This capability is possible through A.I. Natural Language Processing (NLP). NLP allows cognitive bots to intelligently assess, analyze, and identify text (text analytics) e.g. sentiment analysis, comparing text (fuzzy compares), classifying text, or interpreting the text. With A.I NLP, cognitive bots can also understand and interpret human-natural language (even in other languages than English!)

In this automated process of understanding customer, marketing department can have a better confidence in releasing products or services that aims the heart and loyalty of their target customers.

Take a peek on how to automatically gain customer feedback and analyze their sentiments:

3. Find customer insights with AI-driven data analytics for better engagement

Again, it is data and data.

As intelligent automation helps to collect data simultaneously with accuracy guaranteed, enterprise can optimize data to generate customer-driven insights. Using A.I. Machine Learning, cognitive bots can identify the trend and pattern of data that is fed to it. This helps the enterprise to have the data analyzed and optimized to generate insights that the enterprise would like to explore. Thus, this will unlock the key to a better understanding of the market trend and what the customer needs.

With the ease of data collection and analytics, marketing and sales department can have understand better what their customers need, especially the newest trend alive in the market. Using the right automation tools, enterprise can engage their customers better among the saturated business environment. Data-driven insights are the key to greater innovation. This will help the business to tackle the conundrum of what is the game changer. This will improve the competitive values of the business itself.

Take a peek on the example of how to do predictive analysis with Machine Learning:

4. Messaging at scale and personalized chats to customers

Imagine you can reach out to hundreds (or even thousands) of your customers in less than an hour! Say you are about to release new promotions or discounts of your products and you want to make sure that this message gets to your customers effectively. Reaching them through email via newsletter subscription is one thing, but who checks their email inboxes that often? They might check their inbox and receive your message when your promotion period is over. The challenge is, how to reach them better in time – more effectively?

With the help of this cognitive bots, it is possible! You can customize your message, let it be text, videos, images or GIFs! You can target based on groups with different messages or contents. Cognitive bots just have to send it! It’s so reliable that it can actually send different messages to different targets accordingly, just like how you want it. Cognitive bots can get the customers phone number from your system, automatically add them, and send messages. You can also send in different languages!

Take a peek on how cognitive bots send customized message:

5. Automate data entry and consolidation

Have a seamless and streamlined data entry and consolidation with intelligent automation. If you are digitizing data manually, update and enter data between systems manually – you need to stop and find a solution to help you.

Intelligent automation helps to improve your productivity by automating your data management. Cognitive robots can help to read and extract data from documents, this means you don’t have to manually digitize them. The robot can also retrieve data you need and pull them from any sources – let it be systems, platforms, or paper documents, and consolidate it in one master spreadsheet.

See how intelligent automation collects data from paper documents.

Updating CRM and ERP systems can also be a mundane and time-consuming. Imagine having cognitive bots to do this for you, allowing you to do more strategic tasks that have more value for your business.

See how intelligent automation helps to consolidate data.

Take a peek how cognitive bots help to enter, update, and integrate data between systems:

6. Generate reports

Marketing and sales department must have numerous type of reports to generate and process each day. This process involves retrieving data from various sources, consolidating and compiling them, and sending this report to a managerial level for a review. Also, this process can be recurring weekly, monthly, and yearly.

But how if you can automatically generate cross-functional reports in seconds? Streamlined report generation of your advertisement performance? Metrics report? Analytical report of customer engagement via social media performance?

Generating reports is one of the most recurring tasks any department has, including and especially marketing and sales department with a lot of variables to measure periodically. Recurring tasks, that mostly include processes that deal with data, are burdening employees to spend – on average – 19 workdays every year on this type of task.

Find out about how much time are you wasting on recurring tasks

Take a peek how you can automate reports generation with intelligent automation:

Benefits of Intelligent Automation for Marketing and Sales

Helping employees for better productivity and business efficiency

A lot of the times employees are met with repetitive and high volume tasks in Marketing and Sales, there might be a variety of paper-work and data to process. Intelligent automation can help employees decrease their work load by automating these tasks. Not only this will save a significant amount of time, employees can also use the saved time to up-skill and complete higher value added work.

Intelligent automation can help auto a wide variety of work processes, including payment processing, directing customers’ enquiries and many more. With digital transformation being essential for businesses to thrive in the market, IA will be able to help businesses keep their competitive advantage.

Increase Revenue

With an increase in work efficiency and time saved, this will lead business in securing more revenue. Incorporating intelligent automation is you business strategy can help automate repetitive work processes with reduced errors, decreased processing time and increased ROI. Artificial Intelligence technologies can help businesses target their customers’ needs without wasting resources on demographics that will not be interested in the products or services.

Instant Customer Insights

Intelligent automation paves more efficient and effective way to gather and use data. This will unlock the key for Marketing department to have a better understanding of the market trends and what the customer needs.

Intelligent Automation transforms Marketing and Sales

In conclusion, the implementation of intelligent automation in Marketing and Sales is transforming how customers and business interact.

Without the technology a few years back, these functions were once considered as impossible. Nowadays, businesses is able to hyper customize their interaction for each customer and prospect.

However, with the powerful AI algorithm continue to advance, we have not unlock the full potential. AI will only be more powerful and helpful for business in the future of digital transformation.

Read more: All You Need to Know about Artificial Intelligence – Why and How AI is Transforming the World?

Written by: Kezia Nadira & Reiko Anjani